Authored by Rupert Hargreaves via ValueWalk.com,
Oil lending could go down even more
Even though the price of oil has nearly doubled from its lows printed at the beginning of last year, it seems that for many oil and gas companies, the downturn continues to weigh on operations.
Goldman's Jan Hatzius believes the odds of a government shutdown next week are fairly low, but rise to around one in three if the debate extends into May. A shutdown at the start of the next fiscal year, in October, is a greater risk in their view.
Yesterday, we presented a Deutsche Bank research report which tried to evaluate whether, despite polls suggesting otherwise, a Le Pen-Melenchon first round victory was possible in the French election this coming Sunday. In a surprising break from the conventional wisdom, this is what DB concluded:
Two months ago, Bloomberg's Patrick Clark penned an article that promptly went viral as it touched on a rather unorthodox topic: a pet leasing, or rather rental, company aimed at subprime borrowers who could not afford to buy their pet outright.
The company in question is Wags Lending, a/k/a Bristlecone, was founded by Dusty Wunderlich in 2003. A brief background from the original BBG piece:
We almost made it a full month without a prominent hedge fund shuttering - an eternity in an age when ETFs and passive vehicles soak up several billion in capital each day at the expense of "active" managers - and then Bloomberg spoiled the streak when moments ago it reported that John Burbank, one of the handful of investors who made a killing from shorting subprime, and head of the $2.4 billion Passport Capital is shutting down one of his core hedge funds, the latest in a string of closings hitting the industry.